In this year's game between Katy school district's first two high schools, Katy High's colors will fly from the visitors' side of the stadium while Taylor's fans plant their royal blue and white in the home section.

Weisner remembers the first varsity match as unusual, not just because Katy made one field goal and Taylor scored five touchdowns, but because Taylor's campus was still under construction and its students attended Katy until the middle of the school year.

"We knew most of them, but we surely wanted to beat them just as surely as they wanted to beat us," Weisner said. "I just remember a lot of what would be called `trash talking' now, a lot of jawing between the teams: `We're going to beat you guys; you're no good and we're so much better.' "

Over the years, the Taylor-Katy games have left strong memories for former Taylor players, too.

Vivid memories

Josh Pickering, 21, now a senior telecommunications major at Baylor University, played football for four years at Taylor. He remembers that just before one game, the Mustangs returned from warmups to find the walls of the locker room decked out in Katy's colors, red and white, along with posters and papers praising Katy and belittling Taylor.

Katy won the game, 17-10, but Taylor's team was pleased to hold Katy to 17 points.

"They had never won a game by seven. It was always more. That was the best game I ever played. I had 15 tackles and one interception," he said.

Later, when Katy went to the state championship and won, Pickering watched Katy's quarterback.

"I thought, `I intercepted that state (team's) quarterback and helped Taylor play our hearts out that Friday night.' I felt good."

He has since watched the film of that game many times and always checks the newspaper for the Taylor-Katy score.

A former Taylor band member, Kenna Lang, 20, remembers discourteous fans at the Katy game.

"The rivalry was definitely intense and involved more than just the football game," she said. "We would go to the games, and the fans would throw things at us when we were waiting to perform our halftime show."

She remembers curses, insults and being struck by quarters.

Lang had many friends at Katy with whom she had gone to junior high, "but that didn't matter come game time," she said.

When Taylor lost, Lang would hear about it from Katy friends for weeks.

"In fact, it doesn't end in high school for them," she said. "I still hear about their football team and their wins today, years later ... This rivalry did strain friendships."

"Everyone would wear their camouflage to school on Friday for the sold-out pep rally, and we'd all cheer as the football team ripped apart the stuffed Tiger," he said. "But however much fun the cheering was, there were always certain precautions we took each year to protect ourselves from vandalism."

Though damage caused by either side was minuscule, said Chakalis.

"On the night of the game, we had to park our cars in a parking lot guarded by a police officer," he said.

Katy, located at 6331 Highway Blvd., celebrated its centennial during the 1998-99 school year, 16 years after beginning its varsity football program.

Much of Katy's rivalry with the newer school was based in jealousy of Taylor's location at 20700 Kingsland Blvd., an upscale subdivision -- and such details as brass handrails on Taylor's staircases, Weisner said.

Ramsay Zaki, 20, Class of 2000 and a former member of Taylor's show choir, Expressions, said Katy was jealous of Taylor's achievements off the field.

Taylor students knew they were likely to be beaten by Katy in football, but comforted themselves by claiming they were more than a match for the Tigers in academics, tennis, golf and other areas, Zaki said.

Not only was that a long night for Katy, but also the start of a four-year Taylor winning stretch.

"The rivalry was a natural response to Taylor's breaking off from Katy," he said.

High attendance at the Katy-Taylor games has stemmed from both teams' traditions of top-level football, he said.

"We've had some pretty good ballgames over the years, and that creates a lot of interest," Johnston said.

The dividing line

One of Johnston's favorite Katy-Taylor games was in 1986, when the two 5-A teams in District 19 faced off, each with a 5-0 record. Katy beat Taylor 35-19.

Katy won state championships in 1997 and 2000 and has won the District 19-5A title for seven years.

Supporters of both schools throughout the community are unwavering in their loyalties, he said.

"Mason Road," Johnston said, referring to a main thoroughfare in the middle of the five-mile stretch between the two campuses, "is like the Mason-Dixon line."

While Taylor seemed to flourish in the 1980s, Katy has been on top for much of the 1990s until now.

While admitting that Taylor didn't have the best record against the school's hometown rival during his high school years, Chakalis renews hope each year that his school will do better.

"We had the same fever for revenge every year as we entered the packed stadium -- a pack of blue versus a pack of red," he said. "We'd cheer till the very end no matter what the score was."

Kendra Laymon, Katy Class of '98 and a student at Baylor University in Waco, remembers being miserable when Katy lost.

"My sophomore year was the only time Taylor beat us, 10-7, while I attended Katy High School," she said. "I was so upset that I cried when it was over. It is an intense rivalry that everyone takes personally."

But it also made the games more interesting, she said.

Some Taylor fans had become accustomed to defeat at Katy's hands when, in 1995, Taylor won.

"That was the first time we had beaten them in nine years, and we haven't won since then," said Stacey Meineke, a '98 Taylor graduate who now attends Baylor.

Katy went on to win state championships during half of Meineke's high school years.

Katy had a winning tradition before Taylor was built. Don Elder, 56, a 1963 graduate of Katy High School and member of the school district board 1982-86, was a 10th-grader when Katy won its first state championship in 1960. Katy was still the only high school in town when he played varsity in '63, the year Katy won the bi-district 25AA championship.

His son, Shane Elder, a '95 graduate now working on his sports marketing master's degree at Texas A&M University, also played football for Katy while maintaining friendships with Taylor players.

"We wanted to see all our friends have a good competition, a hard competition, not a get-even type deal," Don Elder said.

Walking on both sides

Several alumni from each high school have learned to live with divided loyalties within their families -- or within themselves.

Russell Faldyn, Katy High School's freshman class principal, attended Taylor in the 1978-79 school year, when it began its first junior varsity football team. He played defensive tackle.

"Taylor wasn't open yet," he said, "when the junior varsity teams played each other on Friday night, and on Monday, walked the same hallways together."

Faldyn shifted with the rest of Taylor's students to the new facility at mid-term, then graduated with Taylor's Class of '82.

"My sister and brother graduated from Katy High School -- in fact, my oldest sister was at Katy when I played for Taylor," Faldyn said.

As principal, he attends Katy's football games to monitor students' behavior in the bleachers and help with crowd control.

He resolves his career loyalties to Katy and his old ties to Taylor by walking both sides of the stadium.

"I'm in a unique position," he said. "And I believe that the tradition of rivalry, not just on the field, motivates all the kids."

A community affair

Lester Reinecker, 54, now assistant director for the Katy West Transportation Department, which serves the district's west end, also has a special vantage point on the rivalry.

He had been a baseball coach at Katy for nine years when he was named an assistant football coach at Taylor, coaching there from 1979-82.

Now, he said, the Katy/Taylor rivalry has developed a tradition similar to the Army-Navy or Texas A&M-University of Texas games.

"It's something the whole community looks forward to," he said.

"It's always a sell-out crowd," said Jeff Kaspar, a '74 Katy graduate and president of the Tigers Booster Club.

His wife and a booster club officer, Melissa Kaspar, graduated from Katy in 1976 when it was ranked as a AA class school. Now Katy is a Class 5A school and the Katy/Taylor game has become "the biggest game, as far as ticket sales," she said.

It once was common practice for Katy and Taylor students to steal each others' pre-game signs, she said.

"Now, the kids are not so wrapped up in (the rivalry) as the parents are," she said.

The Kaspars' support of Katy High extended to their two sons, Jason, a '98 Katy grad, and Jarred, who graduated last May. Both competed in basketball and track, and Jarred played football.

There have been years that the two teams didn't play each other because of being bumped up or down into different classifications, said Bill Lane, Taylor's head football coach and athletic director.

But when they have met on the same field, it's been a no-holds-barred competition, Lane said.

"To beat Katy is a whole lot bigger than homecoming. It's a friendly rivalry, but it's still a rivalry," he said. "It extends to the coaches, but it's not the same as for the people who have been here a long time."

Lane said anyone who doubts the reality of Taylor/Katy pre-game fever should "just take a walk in Katy and talk to people in the community to find just how strong this rivalry is."